"For three years [my] son Ben, and I have engaged in a quixotic but determined quest: We've searched for a simple and straightforward way to get the introductory programming language BASIC to run on either my Mac or my PC. Why on Earth would we want to do that, in an era of glossy animation-rendering engines, game-design ogres and sophisticated avatar worlds? Because if you want to give young students a grounding in how computers actually work, there's still nothing better than a little experience at line-by-line programming." Looking beyond the immediate fear-inducing acronym BASIC, this article delves deeply into what it means to simply be in control--via a basic understanding of under the hood--of your own computer, and how our whiz-bang world of technology today is failing to bestow this understanding on this generation of would-be hackers.

i've been teaching my 9 year old brother ruby on rails to get him to understand the idea of object oriented programming and the basic ideas of programming in general. so far im impressed by how well seems to be able to grasp the concepts and especially by how well he seems to be able to understand the same concepts when presented with a code sample that does the same thing in another language.